The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

But before the story ends, he is calling Mr. Pickwick an angel, and his devotion to his master has grown so great that he insists upon being sent to prison in order to look after him. For Sam Weller had, after all, his own kind of innocence: about the evil in the world he had learned as much as anybody, but his experience had never led him to suspect that a person so innocent of evil as Mr. Pickwick could in­habit it.

Mr. Pickwick has hardly engaged Sam Weller when the letter arrives from Dodson and Fogg, announcing that Mrs. Bardell is suing him for Breach of Promise, and his real education be­gins.

If, hitherto, he had ever thought about the Law at all, he had assumed that it was what the Law must always claim to be:

i) Just. Those acts which the Law prohibits and pun­ishes are always unjust; no just or innocent act is ever prohibited or punished.

2,) Efficient. There are no unjust acts or persons that the Law overlooks or allows to go unpunished. 3) Infallible. Those whom the Law finds guilty are always guilty; no innocent person is ever found guilty.

He has got to learn that none of these claims is fulfilled, and why, in this world, they cannot be fulfilled.

Even were the Law formally perfect, its administration cannot be, because it has to be administered, not by angels or machines, but by human individuals who, like all human beings, vary in intelligence, temperament and moral char­acter: some are clever, some stupid, some kind, some cruel, some scrupulous, some unscrupulous.

Moreover, lawyers are in the morally anomalous position of owing their livelihood and social status to the criminal, the unjust and the ignorant; if all men knew the Law and kept it, there would be no work for lawyers. Doctors also owe their livelihood to an evil, sickness, but at least sickness is a natural evil—men do not desire ill health—but crimes and civil wrongs are acts of human choice, so that the contradiction between the purpose of Law and the personal interest of lawyers is more glaring. And then the complexity of the Law and the nature of the legal process make those who practice law peculiarly

liable to a vice which one might call the vice of Imaginary In­nocence.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

A game is a closed world of action which has no relation to any other actions of those who play it; the players have no motive for playing the game except the pleasure it gives them, and the outcome of the game has no consequences beyond it­self. Stricdy speaking, a game in which the players are paid to play, or in which they play for money stakes, ceases to be a game, for money exists outside the closed world of the game. In practice, one may say that a game played for stakes remains a game so long as the sums of money won or lost are felt by the players to be, not real, but token payments, that is to say, what they win or lose has no sensible effect upon their lives after the game is over.

The closed world of the game is one of mock passions, not real ones. Many games are, formally, mock batdes, but if any one of the players should feel or display real hostility, he im­mediately ceases to be a player. Even in boxing and wresding matches, in which the claim to be called games at all is doubt­ful, the ritual of shaking hands at the beginning and end asserts that they are not fights between real enemies.

Within the closed world of the game the only human beings are the players; the other inhabitants are things, balls, bats, chessman, cards, etc.

Like the real world, the game world is a world of laws which the players must obey because obedience to them is a necessary condition for entering it. In the game world there is only one crime, cheating, and the penalty for this is exclusion; once a man is known to be a cheat, no other player will play with him.

In a game the pleasure of playing, of exercising skill, takes precedence over the pleasure of winning. If this were not so, if victory were the real goal, a skillful player would prefer to have an unskillful one as his opponent, but only those to whom, like cardsharpers, a game is not a game but a livelihood, prefer this. In the game world the pleasure of victory is the

pleasure of just winning. The game world, therefore, is an innocent world because the ethical judgment good-or-bad does not apply to it; a good game means a game at the conclusion of which all the players, whether winners or losers, can truth­fully say that they have enjoyed diemselves, a point which is made by the Little Man's speech after the cricket match be­tween Dingley Dell and Muggleton.